Hiran Venugopalan (Old)

The way India’s so called #1 Taxi Service works : On 6th of Feb, we had to travel to Kerala by train and we had decided to take a cab from our home at Neotown, Electronic City to KRPuram Railway Station. My sister had made a call to Meru Cabs at around 6 and requested for a booking at 6.30. As usual , they said the cabs weren’t available in Genie, but was available in Meru at 6.40 pm. Since we had no other choice, we agreed to it, after repeatedly reassuring that the cab would reach exactly by 6.40 and specifically mentioned that our plans would go for a toss if the cab reaches later than 6.40. He guaranteed the trip and said we would get a confirmation SMS soon and the driver details 20 minutes before the ride, both of which didn’t happen till 6.25. We then called them and after a lot of confusion and discussion, got a very blunt and arrogant statement that “We have cancelled the ride”.

After some heated arguments we hung up the call since we didn’t have time to waste. It was too late to search out for an alternative and autos weren’t available then, and we had to drive our own car half the way and switch to an auto later (at a very high rate, of course). In spite of all the rush and panic, we still had to miss our train since we reached the station late! We later had to alter our journey plan by driving all the way from Bangalore to Palakkad in our own vehicle, when we had talkal train tickets for four people (to and fro)

Thanks to the most unprofessional, irresponsible and unethical service by the so-called No1 cab service of the country, we were able to spend 4k on Tatkal tickets (when getting a Tatkal ticket is considered luckier than winning a lottery, we had surprisingly been able to grab tatkal ticket for 4 of us in 3 AC) and 8k on petrol+tolls and go through a lot of pain and panic in a matter of few hours!